When Amazon.com decided to piss off myself and a slew of other Slashdotters with their decision to pursue a frivolous patent lawsuit against B&N, I decided it would be prudent to remove links to IMDB, owned by Amazon, and avoid visiting their site, thereby depriving them of banner ad revenue until such time as they decided to grow a conscience. Doing my small part to be an activist and try to make the world a better place, right? It's seeming sillier everyday.

If I'm going to be a stickler on such issues, right now, even having a movielog is something of a mockery. What the MPAA is doing these days is utterly indefensible in my eyes. As nasty as Amazon's behavior has been, if I had to compare, I'd say the MPAA is pretty much dwarfing them in evilness.

So here's the quandry: Last night, I go to a movie, which is distributed by Columbia, a division of Sony pictures. The movie? Very enjoyable. The company behind it? One of the plantiffs named in a lawsuit which, sadly, is far more vicious and potentially damaging to the general public than the Amazon one. (At least Amazon is picking on someone their own size, dirty as their tactics may be. The MPAA is trying to go after defenseless, Linux using web authors and programmers like me. Eeek.)

A truly consistent stance would be to boycott all movies which come from distribution houses who choose to participate in this madness. That's pretty much all the major commercial productions (I didn't see Dreamworks SKG listed in there, so maybe they're ok. I dunno. Actually, I don't see Disney listed either. Hmmmm). Not cool. I don't think I have such resolve. Am I a sheep?

As much as I despise what they're doing, the idea of imposing such a stricture on myself seems unthinkable. Almost as unthinkable as the resolve I once (sort of) made against buying cds produced by major record labels when they were terrorizing mp3 traders. The mp3 pirates were legally in the wrong, but it just seemed nasty for the corporate lawyers to be harrassing them. A gesture of bad will, even though the record companies had a legal right. Again, the situation with the MPAA/DVD Consortium is an order of magnitude worse.

Just bringing in lawyers to try to scare people into silence. It's mafia-esque. They've got no legal ground to stand on, except maybe that of laws passed very recently by politicians under what appear to be very suspicious circumstances. A little high-powered lobbying, under-the-table currency changing hands, and a horny President to distract the populace while one of the biggest legislative heists in history is foisted on the American consumer. All orchestrated by the same people to whom my ticket money is destined. How far does it have to go before people like me say, "Enough! No more out of my pocket to support this."

Of course, we could use the rationalization that the people making the movies are not the same ones perpetrating the evil. The writers, the actors, the producers, the effects crews, the artists. They have virtually no control (or even knowledge, in many cases) of what happens on the other side of the camp. It's these people I don't mind funding. In fact, in the case of good movies, I would want my money to go to them for a product well done, in hopes they'll be rewarded and more will be made.

The trouble, again, is consistency. I doubt the department responsible for maintaining the imdb content or programming the engine have any say in what Amazon's lawyers do. Is it right or fair to punish them for idiocies of the legal department? Uggggh.

Quoting good ole Shakespear. "Let's kill all the lawyers, and kill them tonight."

Indeed.

Call me weak of spirit, but I don't intend to deprive myself of such a rich cultural/ entertainment resource, the modern movie, just yet. I am thinking about reinstating the imdb links, mainly because of this reasoning: if I'm not gonna take action to protest the larger injustice, why raise a big stink about the smaller one? Cause it's less of an inconvenience? It's the consistency problem.

Well, I think I'll just leave things as they are right now, and think about it for a few days. I may bring IMDB links back; I may not. I'll have to give it some more thought. Reader comments, as always, are also appreciated via email. (I'm working on the public comment engine for this site, but it's still gonna be a while.)

Well, a little bit of coding, and a little bit of sleeping is in my future. Maybe a little bit of reading too. That's it for this ramble.